Category: WordCamp

By Adam Warner

After a year of anticipation and planning, SiteLock arrived in Nashville, TN for WordCamp US – ready to ‘beat hackers to the draw!’ We sponsored the event again this year, allowing us to meet many of the 1,702 attendees from all around the world. There were also 1,182 viewers who live-streamed the event, making the total attendee count a whopping 3,584!

By Adam Warner

This past weekend SiteLock attended WordCamp Seattle as a Gold sponsor. It was a heavily attended event with almost five hundred WordPress designers, developers, and content creators who filled the Washington State Convention Center’s Tahoma space on the third floor.

Our experience as a sponsor was excellent! Organizers did a fantastic job placing all the sponsor tables in the same room as registration and refreshments and we had ample room to interact with attendees and learn more about their businesses and the security needs of their clients.

In addition to chatting with attendees, we really love the content that WordCamps offer and the schedule in Seattle provided some unique talks. Here are a few of our favorites:

By Adam Warner

WordCamp Phoenix has a reputation for being a great event. And lucky for SiteLock, it was close to our headquarters in Scottsdale, allowing more of the SiteLock team to attend than usual, many of them first-time WordCampers!

As someone who works remotely and travels often, this event was especially fruitful for me because it meant I could spend some quality time with our entire team, many of whom I’ve never met in person due toour rapid growth.

By Adam Warner

The SiteLock team recently traveled to Oregon forWordCamp Portland where we had a sponsor table and met many (if not most) of the attendees. It was a busy camp morning for me because I also presented a session titled “5 Steps to Personal and Website Security“. I’m happy to report that my session was received very well among the WordCampers.

The Sponsor Experience

First and foremost, I want to give a shout-out to the#WCPDX organizers. They did an excellent job ensuring the sponsor tables were placed in a room that received steady traffic. The tables were set up between the session rooms, also conveniently located next to the coffee, water, and other refreshments.

The Talks

As with most WordCamps, the session topics were relevant to all types of WordPress users, and the session times were 35 minutes, plus 10 minutes at the end for Q&A. However, there were also lightning talks of 10-15 minutes, which were informative and entertaining.

Ethan Clevenger’s lightning talk discussed how to succeed as a freelancer, and in particular, the reasoning behind raising your prices and how to avoid the fear of making less money. Not only did his talk give valid advice on increasing your revenue while reducing your need to “constantly chase new clients,” but Ethan was also pretty hilarious in the delivery of his content.

In Praise of the Side Project: Learn New Skills, Make Money, and Have Fun.

Rachel Cherry is a Senior Software Engineer at The Walt Disney Company and delivered a unique and inspiring talk to those in attendance. She showed proof that side projects can lead to bigger things like Apple, Twitter, and even Gmail. The point she made though, was that they don’t always have to, sometimes side projects can simply be for testing the waters. This could include learning a new software package, drafting a blog about your favorite food to improve your writing skills, or building websites to razz your friends (#hiroy). Judging by the comments after, her talk made those in attendance feel at ease and less worried about their half-done projects.

Automating Your Workflow

Andrew Taylor’s talk about automation was great. Specifically, automating as much of your daily workflow as possible in order to put processes in place that you can rely on. This also allows you to be more productive. Even though it was a lightning talk, he packed in both the philosophy behind continuous integration and some actual methods he uses in his day-to-day routine.

Don’t Waste Your Content: Repurpose and Keep It Alive

Bob Dunn, more commonly known asBobWP online, delivered a great talk on why and how to repurpose any content you’ve created. He’s been blogging for ten years and produces three successful podcasts. How does he do it? You guessed it, repurposing content in order to save time and meet the needs of his different audiences.

A Little Fun and Frustration with Our Raffle

We always try to do something a little special at WordCamps, in addition to giving out webcam covers and t-shirts. In Portland, we raffled off an Amazon gift card, which was a fun experience. When reading the winning ticket numbers, we had to go through A LOT of them before we finally had a winner. It actually turned out to be pretty entertaining and helped build anticipation.

By all accounts, WordCamp Portland was a great event and one I know we’ll be back to next year. If you weren’t able to attend and you’d like to know more about SiteLock, I encourage you to read more about our company and products, likemalware scanning and auto-removal, as well as ourweb application firewall options.

By Adam Warner

Last week we found ourselves in Denver, CO foranother amazing WordCamp. We sponsored the event as part of our global sponsorship program, which also included table space that gave us ample opportunity to meet existing SiteLock customers and explain our website security services to those new to the WordPress community.

An impressive 450 attendees descended on the Twin Cities to learn and share all things WordPress. If you look close at the image below, you’ll see two planes in addition to the one I was on, all landing in Minneapolis. I’d like to think there were some other excited WordCampers coming in at the same time as my own flight.

SiteLock was among the 450 attendees, and we also sponsored the event. We were there in full force with copious amounts of swag and a $200 Amazon gift card for our raffle.

By Adam Warner

SiteLock sponsored and attendedWordCamp Boston 2017 this past weekend. It was oursecond year in attendance, and as expected, it was a great event! In this post, we share some of our experiences from the event, including a slight hiccup and how we overcame it.

By Adam Warner

After a year of waiting and months of planning, SiteLock finally landed in Paris, France for our second year at WordCamp Europe! We sponsored the event again this year and were overwhelmed by the attendance of 1,900 people from 79 countries. Not to mention the 1,000 viewers who live-streamed the event, totaling a count of 2,900 WordPress enthusiasts!

For those of you who were at the show, you probably met at least one person in red from the SiteLock crew. From left to right, we sent these handsome folks below (note, I’m the one in the middle!).

For those of you who couldn’t make it, we’ve recapped the event with some of our favorite moments below.

By Adam Warner

Last week I attended and spoke at the second annual WordCamp Jacksonville. It was my first time attending this camp and it didn’t disappoint. As the title of this post suggests, it seemed there was something for every type of WordPress user, and that’s not always an easy feat to achieve.

By Adam Warner

When I attended my first WordCamp in 2011, I instantly fell in love with these events. Over the past year and a half, I’ve been fortunate to attend 29 different WordCamps around the world, and have learned so much from each and every one. In this time, I’ve realized what the absolute best part about any WordCamp is, and it’s my pleasure to share that with you.

Although there is a “best thing” about WordCamps (in my opinion), there are so many great things that should also be included here.

An Inexpensive Opportunity to Learn

WordCamps are volunteer led and locally organized events. Each one is created by the community, for the community. The WordPress community is like no other I’ve been involved with. It’s open and collaborative with the goal to openly share knowledge in order to elevate attendee skills and understanding of the web publishing space.

WordCamps are in part funded by sponsors. There are global sponsors (SiteLock included), and many sponsors who are local to the event location. It’s an opportunity for companies and individuals to get their brand in front of attendees, but more than that, it’s a great way to give back to the WordPress project in a meaningful way.

Because sponsors donate their time and money, that means WordCamps can keep ticket costs low, usually in the $35 to $40 range. The affordable price tag makes these events accessible to more people than a traditional trade show or event where admission can cost hundreds and even thousands of dollars.

Shared Knowledge, Experience and Partnerships

If you went to a trade show that included mostly local businesses, many with competing products and services, would you expect that they would share their best advice for acquiring and managing their customers? Probably not. But this is exactly what happens at a WordCamp.

I’ve seen premium plugin business owners discussing their revenue details. I’ve seen hosting companies commiserating on technical challenges and how they have approached a solution. I’ve seen two real estate website development agencies sharing how they acquire customers.

Similar to the mission of WordPress, Democratizing Publishing, the official WordCamp mission statement might as well be Elevating Each Other. Of course, it’s not all altruistic either. There are business partnership opportunities to be explored and agreed upon during WordCamps too, and this happens regularly. Whether it’s between two developers who team up to start an agency, or between larger companies finding a mutually beneficial subject to offer together.

The Session Topics

And now we’re getting closer to the meaning behind the title of this post. Every WordCamp session I’ve attended has been something useful, relevant and actionable. No matter whether you’re a blogger, designer, developer, business owner or a combination of these, there is always useful insight being shared by speakers that attendees can take away and implement for their own WordPress journeys.

Not only are the scheduled sessions always packed with useful information, but so are the conversations you have with others in the Hallway Track. If you’re not familiar, the Hallway Track is a term used to describe the conversations and knowledge sharing that occur during and after WordCamp sessions. All of this leads me to the best part of a WordCamp…

The People

The individual people that plan, organize, sponsor, and attend are the best part of any WordCamp. For the most part, there is a similarity between people who are involved in WordPress, and especially so with people who get involved with WordCamps. The common denominator is that they are all genuinely nice people.

I have no scientific data to prove this niceness, of course, it’s my own generalization. Even more than this, people at WordCamps are eager to learn and are even more eager to connect deeply with others who share the same passion for building the web that creates real and lasting relationships.